How to install LightSwitch Beta 2?

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool for building data-driven Silverlight Application using Visual Studio IDE. It automatically generates the User Interface for a Data Source without writing any code. You can write a small amount of code also to meet your requirement.

LightSwitch is currently in it's Beta 2 stage. Read this post to know about the installation process of it. Also find the installer location to download it freely.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Attaching an External DataSource in LightSwitch Application

You might know that, LightSwitch is now in Beta 2 stage. Microsoft released it few days ago. I have a series of Tutorial on LightSwitch Beta 1 where we discussed on creating database tables using the LightSwitch table designer.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to attach an existing database table available in your SQL server database. This was also available in Beta 1 release. This time we will discuss with the latest version. Read the full post and at the end leave your feedback.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 under CodeProject | LightSwitch

Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4

Sometime your Silverlight application becomes too larger and creates a bigger XAP file. This causes issue while loading your XAP file for the first time as it increases the loading time for downloading the XAp. So, what will you do in this case? There is one answer: split your application in multiple projects which will create multiple XAPs and then use On Demand downloading feature.

Absolutely right, but you may sometime include 3rd party assembly references. In such case, storing them in a separate XAP and writing the code for downloading them on demand will be another hectic. So, what's the easy process? In this article we will learn the same. Read to know more and provide your feedback in case you need more information.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Sunday, March 13, 2011 under Silverlight | SilverlightTips

History of Internet Explorer [Birth of #IE to #IE9]

Microsoft is going to release Internet Explorer 9 RTM on Monday, 14th March 2011. Currently it is in Release Candidate and if you want to try it out, can download the RC version from net. Internet Explorer 9 has lots of new features and enhancements which will give you much faster and secure web experience.

In this post, we will discuss about the history of Internet Explorer which will include various Internet Explorer versions and their features.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Saturday, March 12, 2011 under CodeProject | IE

Announcing Winner of DotNetBar for Silverlight controls worth $219

On 23rd January 2011, I declared a contest to Giveaway 4 licenses of DevComponents DotNetBar for Silverlight, each costs around $219. The contest was for 1 month and was ended on 28th February 2011. As mentioned in that post, I am going to declare the Winners in this post. Read to know more about the Winner.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Saturday, March 05, 2011 under DevComponent | Silverlight

Color Highlighting in Visual Studio XAML page using ReSharper 6

You all might know about ReSharper tool. The current stable version of ReSharper is v5. The ReSharper team is currently working on their development to release the next version of ReSharper i.e. v6.

The new version of ReSharper has some cool new features like JavaScript, CSS and XAML support. It is currently in the early development stage and user has right to try out the new features and give feedbacks to improve them.

Yesterday I installed the new EAP release and tried out some cool feature. Among them one is: "Color support in XAML page". In this post, I am going to describe it to you. Read out the full post to learn about it.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Wednesday, March 02, 2011 under CodeProject | ReSharper

Monthly News Digest @SilverlightZone - 28 February 2011

Today we have completed 2nd month of our activity in Silverlight-Zone.com and got a huge nos. of responses from the community. In two months we crossed 30K+ visitors count which is pretty good. Audiences are mainly from United States, India and United Kingdom, followed by France and Germany. I will appreciate everyone's contribution towards this blog to make it a great success.

Silverlight-Zone.com posts articles/news on Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XNA, LightSwitch, XAML and Expression Blend etc. We are trying our level best to keep all of you updated on Silverlight-Zone.com. We are also publishing all those entries to Twitter and Facebook, whenever a new post has been submitted, keeping all followers up-to date. Find out more of February 2011 in this post.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Monday, February 28, 2011 under ExpressionBlend | LightSwitch

Multi Targeted Add Reference Support in Productivity Power Tools

The Add Reference dialog is not a new one in Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, but in this release they updated this dialog with Multi Targeting feature. What is this multi targeting feature? If you are using the new Add Reference dialog of Productivity Power Tools since it was released, you might find that, some dlls are not available there if your project is targeting Client Profile.

This post will discuss about this. Now, using the updated add reference dialog you can see all dlls which are not available in Client Profile framework. This also give you option to add those assemblies in your project. So, let's discuss on it.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Saturday, February 26, 2011 under CodeProject | ProductivityPowerTools

"Quick Find" a better way using Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools

You might know about the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools extension, which has several features on top of the Visual Studio's default IDE features. Recently, they released the new version which has some other benefits over the previous versions.

In this post, I am going to discuss on the Quick Find feature of the new Productivity Power Tools. Read the full post to know more about it.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Saturday, February 26, 2011 under CodeProject | ProductivityPowerTools

Day 3: Working with Masked TextBox of Telerik Silverlight RadControls

This is my 3rd day when I explored the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight. Today, I explored the Masked TextBox control of Telerik. It's a good one and gives several options to use.

In this article, I am going to describe you all the APIs of Masked TextBox control and the ways to use it to mask your input. Hope this will help you to understand the control in depth. As always, your feedback and suggestions are always welcome to improve my article content.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 under Silverlight | Telerik

Day 2: Working with BusyIndicator of Telerik Silverlight RadControls

Last week I started exploring Telerik RadControls for Silverlight. On Day 1 of exploration, I just gone thru the basic overview of Telerik RadControls and installation steps.

In this post, we will explore the BusyIndicator that comes with RadControls. The basic code is similar to what comes with Silverlight by default. The difference which catches the eye is the circular progress bar.

Let's start exploring it and see what are the properties available there and how to start working with this control.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 under Silverlight | Telerik

Download Microsoft Imagine Cup Session PPT on Silverlight

On 12th February 2011, I attended the Microsoft Imagine Cup Championship event in Mumbai, organized by MSPs and delivered a full day session on Silverlight.

Thanks to all who attended my session. Those who were unable to attend it for any reason, can view the slides online or can download it free to view it offline. Read the full post to know more about the event and download the slides for your offline view.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Sunday, February 13, 2011 under Events | ImagineCup

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 11 February 2011 - #27

Today, we have 12 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight, LightSwitch and/or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have again 11 Authors. Today's posts are from: Vikas, Mahesh Sabnis, Abhishek Baxi, Jesse Liberty, Owen Williams, Jeremy Likness, Dave Isbitski, Windows Phone Geek, John Papa, John-Daniel Trask and Travis Pettijohn.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Friday, February 11, 2011 under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 10 February 2011 - #26

Today, we have 13 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight, LightSwitch and/or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have again 12 Authors. Today's posts are from: Digital Sound, Kunal Chowdhury, Vasudevan Kannan, Peter Kuhn, Jesse Liberty, Oren Eini, Bill Wagner, Windows Phone Geek, Jeff Prosise, Abhishek Baxi, Beth Messi and Nipun Tomar.

We tweet whenever a new link has been submitted. Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightZone for regular news tweet delivered to your twitter account. Find all the Silverlight/WP7 related article links in this post.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Thursday, February 10, 2011 under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 9 February 2011 - #25

Today, we have 13 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight, LightSwitch and/or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have 12 Authors. Today's posts are from: Asim Sajjad, Zamd, Shawn Wildermuth, Law Bot One, Damon Payne, Ben Willi, Rudi Grobler, Den Delimarsky, Andrea Boschin, Guardian, Doug Holland and Beth Massi.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Wednesday, February 09, 2011 under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Day 1: Working with Telerik Silverlight RadControls

Telerik has a great collection of Silverlight controls named as "RadControls". These controls are built on Microsoft Silverlight and includes 40+ UI controls for building rich line-of-business Silverlight applications. They have some great themes to support those controls.

Some of my readers asked me to write articles on Telerik RadControls. As I received a couple of request, hence thought to start with that. I will write a series of articles on my exploration on that and this is the first one of them. Read to know more about it.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Tuesday, February 08, 2011 under CodeProject | Silverlight

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 8 February 2011 - #24

Today, we have 14 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have posts from: Abhishek Baxi, Telerik Silverlight Team, Oren Gal, Abram John Limpin, Rudy Grobler, Windows Phone Geek, Deborah Kurata, Ali Raza Shaikh, Gill Cleeren, John Garland, Dan Wahlin, Roy Dallal, Microsoft Expression and Laurant Bugnion.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Tuesday, February 08, 2011 under ExpressionBlend | MVVM

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 7 February 2011 - #23

Today, we have 13 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have posts from: Thomas Martinsen, Jeremiah, Vikram Pendse, Jeff Wilcox, Kirupa, Laurent Bugnion, Nigel Sampson, Jeff Prosise, Jaime Rodriguez, Dave Campbell, Deyan Ginev and Emmanuel Nuyttens.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Monday, February 07, 2011 under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 6 February 2011 - #22

Today, we have 9 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have posts from: Michael Washington (@ADefWebServer), Max Paulousky, Michael Crump (@mbcrump), Phil Middlemiss, Dave Campbell (@WynApse), @jprosise, @WinPhoneGeek, Peter Khun (@Mister_Goodcat) and Vikram Pendse (@VikramPendse).

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Sunday, February 06, 2011 under LightSwitch | Silverlight

Microsoft Imagine Cup Championship, Mumbai - 12th Feb 2011

Microsoft Student Partners, Mumbai is presenting the Microsoft Imagine Cup Championship 2011 on 12th February 2011, Saturday. There will be some Hands on Lab sessions, a city level coding and quiz competition. If you are interested, you can attend this event In-Person and it is absolutely Free. Read the full post for more details on the event.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Sunday, February 06, 2011 under Events |

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 5 February 2011 - #21

Today, we have 14 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have posts from: C1_GregL, WinPhoneGeek, Bert ONeill, Jeremy Likness, Jon Galloway, Den Delimarsky, Resco Developer Tools, Dave Campbell (@WynApse), Mike Ormond, Levente Mihaly, Roy Dallal, @mattcasto and @cynergy_systems.

We tweet whenever a new link has been submitted. Follow us on Twitter@SilverlightZone for regular news tweet delivered to your twitter account. Find all the Silverlight/WP7 related article links in this post.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Saturday, February 05, 2011 under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 4 February 2011 - #20

Today, we have 10 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

In this issue we have posts from: Yochay, Howard Dierking, @sorskoot, Mike Taulty, Charles Petzold, Greg Duncan, Jeff Prosise, Abhishek Baxi and John Papa.

Published by Kunal Chowdhury on Friday, February 04, 2011 under Silverlight | SilverlightZone

Daily News Headline @SilverlightZone - 3 February 2011 - #19

Today, we have 11 news items posted in Silverlight-Zone. If you are a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application developer, follow Silverlight-Zone for daily news update.

Subscribe to our news feed and email digest to deliver it to your inbox. We also tweet whenever a new link has been submitted. Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightZone for regular news tweet delivered to your twitter account.